fmrl

about

michael lowell roberts is a creative computer scientist that has produced breakthroughs within the domain of parallel and distributed programming. his distributed actor-based server platform, used to build the mmorpg horizons, is the first elastic, distributed compute engine used for a production multiplayer game server, long before the word “cloud” became a staple of the computer science lexicon.

he is the sole inventor of the first parallelized incremental garbage collector, an algorithm that eliminates performance penalties normally associated with garbage collection in multi-threaded environments. His collector is also an excellent example of how actor systems can applied to parallelize algorithms with complex state requirements– an important area of programming that is still poorly understood by the software development industry at large.

projects & patents

orleans (microsoft research)

orleans is a distributed actor system framework for the .NET framework developed by microsoft research that simplifies development of distributed systems for those already comfortable with object-oriented programming.

the nom garbage collector

the nom garbage collector is the first parallelized, incremental garbage collection algorithm and was independently developed and patented by michael. it is also the first garbage collection algorithm capable of delivering real-time performance within a parallelized environment.

the ramalloc cached memory allocator

ramalloc is a parallelized, amortized-constant time memory allocator for objects smaller than a hardware page. it exhibits deterministic performance characteristics, which is necessary for soft real-time applications. it also reduces memory fragmentation, which is important for long-running processes. ramalloc is designed for game and interpreter development but should be useful for other applications as well. ramalloc is also parallelized; there is no global resource that requires serialized access.